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Two weekends ago, Little Man had a birthday. His very first birthday, in fact.

So we had a party.

Duh.

I was so excited to have this party. I planned the food really far in advance and tested out different recipes. My husband was pretty upset when I had to bake several batches of cupcakes before finding one I liked.

Despite significant prior planning, the week leading up to the party kept becoming more and more full of other obligations. It was fairly frustrating to me to watch more and more things I couldn’t avoid filling up every day of that week. I knew it would be difficult to get everything finished. Add to this the project of fixing the deck that turned into a nightmare that we were finishing up to the night before, and I was one stressed mama.

The day of the party, there was too much to do, and too little time to do it. Unfortunately, the cupcakes were not finished being decorated by the time partygoers started to arrive. Thankfully, I have great friends who jumped in right away to help pipe, fill, and sprinkle until they were finished.

In the end, it was probably good. I can get really overacheivery sometimes (cough, cough) and overly concerned with the minutia that other people don’t notice. I can be pretty perfectionist, and it’s good for me to fall short.

And the party was a great success, if I do say so myself. Everyone seemed to have a good time.

Cereal mix, from Martha Stewart, here. I added salt & pepper to the recipe, and threw in homemade goldfish, recipe here. Except we used animal-shaped mini cookie cutters rather than fish-shaped. I highly recommend that recipe for snacking on by itself. So easy and delicious!

And, what you’ve all been waiting for: Cupcakes!

We made 2 cupcakes with 3 different icings. And topped them with a miniature sugar cookie #1!

Then we used a ganache to frost the other half of the chocolate cupcakes. These were seriously chocolatey.

And the sprinkles? Those were my sister’s idea. We made WAY too much royal icing for the #1 cookies and so she squeezed out a bunch of dots onto wax paper. We let them dry, and voila! homemade sprinkles in just the right colors.

Amber- fantastic ideas- can’t wait to try the gold fish- all about home-made rather than store bought…anything! (probably comes from growing up as an MK) I have to try your cupcakes as well- all look so very good =) Beth